Amarillo to Russellville, Ark.

A wild thunderstorm blew through Amarillo in the middle of the night: thunder rolling and booming across the sky, flashes of lightning coming through the motel’s blackout blinds, rain lashing at the window. I got up and closed the window so the rain wouldn’t soak the floor; then I stood there for a minute or so and looked out at the storm. We rarely have thunderstorms in the Bay area, and never on a scale like the thunderstorms on the Great Plains.

I slept late — I’m still on California time, I guess — and fortunately by the time I had taken my shower the motel was no longer serving breakfast. Breakfasts at budget motels, with their limp gray sausage patties, and scrambled egg product that comes in a plastic bag that the motel staff sticks in a microwave to heat up, are well worth sleeping through.

As we drove across Oklahoma, I noticed how green everything looked. The last time we drove across Interstate 40, at about this time of year, Oklahoma had been in the grip of a lengthy and severe drought, and the landscape looked silvery-brown from lack of moisture. This year, though, there has been enough rain to turn the fields bright green. I’d read a chapter from Agatha Christie’s Murder at Hazelmoor to Carol, then look out the car windows at the miraculously green landscape.

By the time we reached Oklahoma City, we were ready for a longer stop. We found our way to Bricktown, the self-proclaimed arts and entertainment district. The weather was hot and sticky — not at all the dry heat we’re used to from having lived in the West for five years — and we were glad to walk along the Bricktown Canal where it seemed a little bit cooler.

We left the pathway along the canal to tour around a city block or two, just to see what was there, and we saw a sign saying: “American Banjo Museum Entrance,” with an arrow pointing around a corner. “We have to go see this museum,” I said. Carol was willing to go. A polite older man took our admission fees. “You can tell this is a real banjo museum when the man at the front desk has a banjo case beside him,” I said. The man smiled and asked me if I played, but I said I only played a little guitar.

I liked the older banjos best, particularly a William Boucher banjo from the 1840s, with a lovely scroll pedhead, and a Bullock Fretless banjo from 1854.

Bullock Fretless Banjo (1954)

Above: Bullock fretless banjo, 1854, American Banjo Museum, Oklahoma City

Most of the banjos were pretty fancy, with complicated inlays on the fingerboard, ornate carving on the neck, elaborate designs painted on the back (i.e., on the resonator head), oddly-shaped banjos, etc. These are the sorts of banjos that appeal to collectors, but they didn’t really appeal to me.

American Banjo Museum

Above: American Banjo Museum, Oklahoma City

I was much more interested in the banjo owned by John Stewart of the Kingston Trio: a “Pete Seeger” model banjo produced by Vega, and played by Stweart during his Kingston Trio years — a working banjo, rather than a show banjo.

But the most interesting rooms what was apparently a repair room. The door was locked, but you look see though a window. There were two tables, the further table stacked up with banjo parts and tools and what might have been glue; on the near table was a banjo that had been disassembled into its component parts: neck assembly, pot, resonator, head, etc.

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Above: American Banjo Museum, Oklahoma City

We spent too much time in the American Banjo Museum. As a result, it was almost 10:30 by the time we checked into our motel.

Grants to Amarillo

Before we got back on the interstate, we drove to El Malpais National Monument, parked at the visitor center, and hiked for about an hour on the Continental Divide National Scenic Trail. We didn’t see much of the badlands for which El Malpais is best known, but we did see a meadow and a dike that was all that was left of a failed 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps project to attempt to dam up a seasonal stream to create a reliable water source, and we did see some beautiful pinyon pine woodlands.

The badlands are actually old lava flows that crept out across the red dirt and sandstone so characteristic of this part of New Mexico. The trail was marked by cairns made up of a mixture of volcanic rock and red sandstone.

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Above: Continental Divide Trail, El Malpais National Monument

In ancient Greece, cairns were inhabited by Hermes, god of travelers, and of thieves and tricksters. Hermes, it was said, got into trouble with Hera for killing her servant Argus. A trial was held, with the other gods and goddesses acting as jurors. Each god or goddess had a stone which represented their vote, and Hermes argued so skilfully in his own defense that all the gods and goddesses cast their stones at his feet, until there was a pile of stones with Hermes inside. Ever since then, Hermes resides, as it were, inside the piles of stones that are cairns, helping travelers find their way.

In New England, I always thought that there was a remote whiff of Hermes inside the cairns that I saw on mountain trails; New England is close enough to Europe that perhaps the old gods and goddesses immigrated with the white Europeans who came to North America; so every New England house I ever lived in had its household gods, our version of the Roman Laertes. But these Western cairns had nothing of the Old World gods and goddesses about them. They did, however, have a presence; I felt there was something partly alive about them; but it was more of a sense of animism than of Olympian divinities.

When we left El Malpais National Monument, I went into the small visitor center to use the bathroom. I tried to avoid the books, but a children’s book titled Eco Trackers caught my eye. Ah, that would be perfect for the ecojustice camp were going to do! That was the third book I bought on this trip; I had gotten an Agatha Christie mystery and another book yesterday in Starrlights Books in Flagstaff.

As we drove towards Albuquerque, I called my dad. “What was that restaurant that you liked so much in downtown Albuquerque?” I asked him. He couldn’t remember the name, but reminded me that is was on the main drag right across from one of the main entrances to the University of New Mexico. We drove down old Route 66, and there it was: Frontier Restaurant, Tony Hillerman’s favorite restaurant. Carol had pozole, flour tortillas, and a peach smoothie; I had breakfast.

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Above: Albuquerque, N.M. (Photo courtesy Carol Steinfeld)

The food was excellent, and the restaurant was a good place for Carol to hang out and watch people while I ran across the street to the University of New Mexico bookstore — where I bought three more books.

We drove on. The red rock country of New Mexico began to flatten out, and turn into the southern end of the Great Plains. We could see dark thunderclouds all around us, and rain coming down in the distance. I was reading the Agatha Christie novel aloud to Carol, when I stopped and said, “Look! there’s standing water on that field!” Coming from drought-stricken California, where it doesn’t rain all summer anyway, that was an amazing sight.

We stopped in Adrian, Texas, at nine o’clock to see if we could get me some dinner. The cafe was closed.

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Above: Adrian, Tex.

But right across the interstate, there was a gas station with a mini-mart. The kind woman at the counter — I’d guess she owned the place — sold me her last two hot dogs. “And I’m glad to sell them both to you,” she said. “So you don’t have any left over to go to waste,” I said. She chuckled and said that was it. They were pretty good hot dogs. I ate them standing by the car looking out at the darkening sky over the wide open, and very green fields, of Adrian.

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Above: Adrian, Tex.

Needles to Grants

Vivid dreams occupied me all night, though I didn’t remember any of them when I awakened in the morning. Perhaps they were anxiety dreams, or dreams of overwork; with Peace Camp and the youth service trip and my ordinary tasks, I worked pretty much seven days a week in the three weeks leading up to vacation.

We got up late, and after I ate breakfast we walked over to the Needles Point Pharmacy. I needed razors, and Carol needed a needle to sew up a shirt.

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Above: Needles, Calif.

The store was pretty big on the inside. I found the razor blades I wanted, and then Carol and I wandered around looking at everything they had. They seemed to have everything. In addition to the usual drugstore merchandise, they had in stock: jigsaw puzzles, Hummel figurines, 3.5 inch diskettes for your computer, writing tablets with air mail paper, a bright red Mickey Mouse travel alarm clock in yellowed plastic packaging, and brand new Clairol blow dryers dating from the 1980s. On a whim, I bought some air mail paper from the very pleasant woman behind the counter.

When we finally started driving, the thermometer outside the motel office read 110 degrees.

Carol drove for most of the day, while I dozed, and read aloud to her from Agatha Christie’s Murder at Hazelmoor. It seemed odd to be reading about a murder in country house in England in the middle of a dark snowy winter, when we were driving through the wide open, sun-filled southwest.

We stopped for some caffeine at a gas station in Navajo, Arizona. While I was in the gas station, Carol wandered over to where a man was selling jewelry that he had made. When i got there, Carol was trying to decide if she liked one of his necklaces. I got to talking with him. He had been born in the area, half Navajo and half Hopi, and he spoke both languages as birth tongues. Then he had been relocated to a Mormon couple in Utah; enlisted in the Army and served in Vietnam; went to college in Provo on the G.I. Bill; and then had lived in Greece, the Bay area, and several other places I have now forgotten.

He was a big supporter of Barack Obama. “He’s the only president who has done anything for Native Americans,” he said. We agreed that, regardless of his merits, that some of the criticism of Obama was due solely to the fact that he wasn’t white. “White people really like to be right,” he said, and I gave a snort of laughter at the truth of that statement. That got us into a discussion of race and racism, during which I insisted that the Boston area, where I grew up, was the most racist place I have ever lived. “Even the white people hate each other in Boston,” I said, thinking of the Yankees, Irish, Italians, and French Canadians. He agreed with me, though I wasn’t convinced he knew anything about Boston.

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Above: Navajo, Ariz.

San Mateo to Needles

We left San Mateo in the middle of the morning, drove down through San Jose and Gilroy, and up over Pacheco Pass into the Central Valley. There’s a grayish-brown cast to the landscape of the Central Valley, and everything looks dry and dead — except where the land has been irrigated for crops.

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Above: Interstate 5, near Lost Hills, Calif.

We’re now in the third year of a severe drought across California. In a few places, acres of trees had been uprooted and left to die, perhaps because they use too much water. On the fences surrounding many agricultural fields were signs protesting any possible reduction in water allotments to agribusiness and farming interests: “No Water = No Jobs,” “Stop the Congress-created Dust Bowl,” etc.

We turned east onto Route 58 through Bakersfield, climbed over the mountains at Tehachapi, heading towards the Mojave Desert. “There’s a Joshua Tree!” I said to Carol, pointing out the car window. The sometimes contorted shapes of Joshua Trees, their arm-like branches, make them seem like beings that are about to move, to turn and point at you.

On a map, it looks like there isn’t much in the desert, but it is far from empty. There’s the highway; there are mysterious industrial plants in the middle of the desert; there are power transmission lines everywhere; there is Edwards Air Force, with its planes, and strange structures on the tops of high mountains; there’s the historic Southern Pacific rail line, now owned by BNSF, with several mile-long freight trains per hour; and there are the Joshua Trees.

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Above: Near Boron, California

In Barstow, we stopped at the Canton Diner for dinner. Carol asked our white waitress if she could get just plain vegetables. The waitress went and got a middle-aged Chinese man from the front desk. Carol explained that she wanted just some plain stir-fried vegetables. He disappeared, and came back in a moment with some uncooked Chinese broccoli, and something that looked like amaranth, to show to her. She choose the Chinese broccoli. “Any meat?” he asked. “No, thank you,” she said apologetically, “I just want some vegetables.” “A little garlic?” he asked. “Sure,” she said. When the plate of stir-fired Chinese broccoli came, it was as good as anything you might get in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

When the man brought us the check, I asked him if he were from Hong Kong. “Yes,” he said, looking a little surprised, “why do you ask?” “You have just a little bit of an English accent,” I said; and he was old enough to have completed his education while Hong Kong was still a British possession. He smiled, and when we walked out, he bid us a pleasant good-bye.

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Above: Canton Diner, Barstow, Calif.

East of Barstow, the landscape grew emptier, though the rail road was still nearby, transmission lines crisscrossed the landscape, and there were still mysterious-looking plants here and there in the distance. The setting sun turned the landscape a warm glowing red.

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Above: Along Interstate 40 east of Newberry Springs, Calif.

We pulled in to Needles at 9:20; it had gotten up to 108 in the middle of the day, and the temperature was still in the mid-90s. The first time I came to Needles, I had just read a biography of Charles Schulz, the cartoonist. He had spent three years of his childhood in Needles, and hated it. It was cold during the winter, so cold he could hear rocks cracking; and during the long summer it was brutally hot, sometimes not getting below 90 at night. But I liked Needles: I liked the small-town feel, I liked the newspaper that’s been continuously published since 1888, I liked the stark desert landscape surrounding the town. I liked it enough that I keep coming back.

The only reason Needles existed when Charles Schulz lived here as a boy was because of the railroad. It’s still a railroad town, and it’s still a small town, with fewer than 5,000 residents. Carol and I took a walk down to the Amtrak depot. A man was standing on his front porch, and we said hi. “Nice and warm,” I said to him. “It’s a lot cooler now than it was,” he said, and we both chuckled. If it weren’t for the climate, it might be a nice place to live.

Pee on Earth Day 2014

Pee on Earth Day is an annual holiday designed to remind us that we are an integral part of the water cycle. Pee on Earth Day is celebrated on the first day of summer (June 21 for the northern hemisphere), since it is likely to be warmest then, and we don’t want to freeze any delicate bits.

I just celebrated Pee on Earth Day. It is somewhat challenging to do so in an urban setting. Let’s just say I waited until dark, and now there is a very happy plum tree.

Peacemaking and the REA

I just learned that the “Call for Papers Committee” of the Religious Education Association (REA) has accepted my proposal to present a workshop on our Peace Experiments program at the annual REA conference in November, 2014. The REA is an international, interfaith association of scholars and practitioners of religious education — it’s exciting that this prestigious association is interested in what our UU congregation has been doing with Peace Experiments.

While I’m all too well aware of the weaknesses of our “Peace Experiments” program, I think what we’re doing does have some interesting features. In particular, while most of the peacemaking curricula that I know about these days tend towards an essentialist educational philosophy (i.e., there are certain essential peacemaking skills that children must learn), our peacemaking program is grounded in an existentialist educational philosophy: we are trying to get children to define themselves as peacemakers, and to help them realize that who they are and the choices they make will shape the world around them.

This is what chaos looks like

Today was the first day of Peace Camp at the San Jose UU Church. One of the things we did today was to play non-competitive games (of course). All kids who live here on the Peninsula seem to know a game they call Chaos Tag. This quickly became the favorite Peace Camp game. It’s fast, frenetic, it takes skill to play well but it can be played with pleasure by mixed age groups, from 5 to adults — a perfect game for a peace camp.

This is what Chaos Tag looks like:

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I’m interested in the fact that this game is such a big part of of kids’ folklore here on the Peninsula. Every kid I’ve met from San Jose to Atherton seems to know and and love this game, and they’ll play for hours. (However, when I worked at the Berkeley UU church a decade ago, I don’t remember kids ever playing Chaos Tag; and one of the young adults on Peace Camp staff who grew up in the East Bay knew the game with slightly different rules under the name “Everybody’s It.”) I’m fascinated with the way this non-competitive game has sunk so deeply into Peninsula kids’ culture — how much they enjoy it, how hard and how long they play.

Sometimes education is a matter of finding out that the kids are already doing the right thing, and then telling them to do more of it.

 

(Note on the photo above: We do have media releases for the kids in Peace Camp, but nevertheless I deliberately blurred facial features in the photo above to preserve anonymity.)

Where we are, where we’re not

The Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies (ASARB) has produced some interesting maps on the geographic distribution of various religious groups, as of 2010. You can search for specific religious groups, including the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA). For the UUA, you can pull up the following types of maps: adherent change, adherent quintile, cartogram, locations, location change, penetration, etc.

I also found county-by-county data in CSV format, which I dumped into a spreadsheet, and played around with. Here’s some numbers for you to think about: Just 5 U.S. counties show a population penetration of between 1.0% and 4.99%: Nantucket County in Massachusetts (1.97%); Jefferson County in Washington (1.45%); Charlottesville County in Virginia (1.37%); Los Alamos County in New Mexico (1.19%); and Windsor County in Vermont (1.15%).

Click on the low-resolution map below (showing population penetration) to go to the ASRAB Web page where you can get high-resolution maps and other data:

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Or read on for a few more facts and figures about Unitarian Universalism that I got from the ASRAB Web site: Continue reading “Where we are, where we’re not”

Meme graphic

Jess Cullinane created a meme graphic, using a quote from a sermon I did a few years ago. Wow, someone made a meme graphic from something I wrote; does that make me one of the cool kids now? OK, I’ll admit that I’ll never be one of the cool kids. But Jess did a really nice job. Here it is:

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Questions for discussion

Driving home from the youth service trip yesterday, we were delayed by a major accident on I-5; what should have been a six-hour trip turned into a nine-hour trip. We spent a lot of time talking, and one of the more interesting conversations was a long discussion of the Harry Potter universe.

Here are some of the questions we discussed (spoiler alert: plot twists are revealed in these questions):

(1) J.K. Rowling has said she thought of Dumbledore as being gay, but when she started publishing the books it wouldn’t do to have GLBTQ characters in books aimed at young people. We speculated that other characters might actually be GLBT or Q. Question for discussion: Which characters did you picture as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or questioning, and why?

(2) At the end of the series, we learn that Harry marries Ginny. There has been, of course, lots of online discussion about whether Harry should have married Hermione. But Harry could also have married one of the minor characters, instead of one of the central characters. Question for discussion: If Harry had to marry one of the minor characters, which one would he marry, and why?

(3) Final question for discussion: If you could be any character or creature in the Harry Potter universe, which one would you be?